This week Daniel and Chris discuss the announcements made recently at TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019. They kick it off with the alpha release of TensorFlow 2.0, which features eager execution and an improved user experience through Keras, which has been integrated into TensorFlow itself. They round out the list with TensorFlow Datasets, TensorFlow Addons, TensorFlow Extended (TFX), and the upcoming inaugural O’Reilly TensorFlow World conference.

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• Discover.bot – A digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels to learn from one another, share stories, and move the bot conversation forward. Want to learn more about building bots? Get started with their Guide to Bot Building Frameworks. 
• GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019
• TensorFlow 2.0 alpha release
• TensorFlow Datasets
• TensorFlow Extended (TFX)
• TensorFlow Addons
• O’Reilly TensorFlow World conference

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

No, this isn’t science fiction! CTRL-labs is using neural signals and AI to build neural interfaces. Adam Berenzweig, from CTRL-labs R&D, joins us to explain how this works and how they have made it practical.

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference – OSCON has been ground zero for the open source community for 20 years. This year they’ve expanded to become a “software development conference” — because in 2019, software development IS open source. The program covers everything from open source, AI, infrastructure, blockchain, edge computing, architecture, and emerging languages. Use the code CHANGELOG20 to get 20% off Bronze, Silver, and Gold passes. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 
• GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data. 

Featuring:

• Adam Berenzweig – Website, LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• O’Reilly AI keynote from CTRL-labs
• CTRL-labs website
• CTRL-kit
• TED talk “The real reason for brains”
• IBM healthcare Practical AI episode

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

While attending the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, Chris met up with Adam Stooke, a speaker and PhD student at UC Berkeley who is doing groundbreaking work in large-scale deep reinforcement learning and robotics. Adam took Chris on a tour of deep reinforcement learning - explaining what it is, how it works, and why it’s one of the hottest technologies in artificial intelligence!

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference – OSCON has been ground zero for the open source community for 20 years. This year they’ve expanded to become a “software development conference” — because in 2019, software development IS open source. The program covers everything from open source, AI, infrastructure, blockchain, edge computing, architecture, and emerging languages. Use the code CHANGELOG20 to get 20% off Bronze, Silver, and Gold passes. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 
• GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data. 

Featuring:

• Adam Stooke – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• NVIDIA GTC: Doing More with More: Recent Achievements in Large-Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Accelerated Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Accelerated Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning - code
• OpenAI Five - Dota 2
• AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II
• NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship
• Crunchbase
• The Hertz Foundation

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Longtime listeners know that we’re always advocating for ‘AI for good’, but this week we have taken it to a whole new level. We had the privilege of chatting with James Hodson, Director of the AI for Good Foundation, about ways they have used artificial intelligence to positively-impact the world - from food production to climate change. James inspired us to find our own ways to use AI for good, and we challenge our listeners to get out there and do some good!

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference – OSCON has been ground zero for the open source community for 20 years. This year they’ve expanded to become a “software development conference” — because in 2019, software development IS open source. The program covers everything from open source, AI, infrastructure, blockchain, edge computing, architecture, and emerging languages. Use the code CHANGELOG20 to get 20% off Bronze, Silver, and Gold passes. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 
• Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog. 

Featuring:

• James Hodson – Website, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• AI For Good Foundation
• AI For Good Foundation Video Lectures
• KDD Earth Day
• “Fragile Earth” Workshop
• Discounted Membership for Practical AI Podcast Listeners!
• AI Experts: Moving forward with AI likely a series of small steps, not giant leaps

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

GIPHY’s head of R&D, Nick Hasty, joins us to discuss their recently released celebrity detector project. He gives us all of the details about that project, but he also tells us about GIPHY’s origins, AI in general at GIPHY, and more!

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• Discover.bot – A digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels to learn from one another, share stories, and move the bot conversation forward. Want to learn more about building bots? Get started with their Guide to Bot Building Frameworks. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 
• GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data. 

Featuring:

• Nick Hasty – Website, LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Blog post about the celeb detector project
• GIPHY Enters the Open Source Community with Celebrity Detector (readwrite article)
• MTCNN method used in the celebrity detector project
• GitHub repo
• Demo page
• 3D projection of celeb face embeddings
• Complete list of all celebs in the model

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Being that this is “practical” AI, we decided that it would be good to take time to discuss various aspects of AI infrastructure. In this full-connected episode, we discuss our personal/local infrastructure along with trends in AI, including infra for training, serving, and data management.

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• DataEngPodcast – A podcast about data engineering and modern data infrastructure. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 
• Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog. 

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Our locally installed stuff:

• Jupyter
• Docker
• Python
• Go
• Postman

Where we see AI workflows running:

• AWS
• GCP
• Azure
• Kubernetes and KubeFlow
• On-prem workstations: 
  • NVIDIA
  • Lambda Labs
  • System76

Experimentation / model development:

• JupyterLab
• Google Colaboratory
• AWS SageMaker
• Data Science platforms: 
  • Domino
  • DataBricks
  • DataRobot
  • H2O.ai

Pipelining and automation:

• Pachyderm
• Airflow
• Luigi
• Model optimization: 
  • OpenVino
  • TensorRT
  • TensorFlow Lite

Serving:

• MXNet
• TensorFlow serving
• Seldon

Monitoring/visibility:

• TensorBoard
• Netron
• Knock knock
• Prometheus
• ElasticSearch

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

While at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference 2019 in Silicon Valley, Chris enjoyed an inspiring conversation with Anima Anandkumar. Clearly a role model - not only for women - but for anyone in the world of AI, Anima relayed how her lifelong passion for mathematics and engineering started when she was only 3 years old in India, and ultimately led to her pioneering deep learning research at Amazon Web Services, CalTech, and NVIDIA.

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• DataEngPodcast – A podcast about data engineering and modern data infrastructure. 
• Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 

Featuring:

• Anima Anandkumar – Website, LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• Anima Anandkumar on Wikipedia
• NVIDIA GTC Speaker
• NVIDIA GTC Presentation: Role of Tensors in Machine Learning
• NVIDIA GTC Presentation: Infusing Physics into Deep Learning Algorithms with Applications to Stable Landing of Drones
• CalTech CMS TensorLab
• Google Scholar

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Clément Delangue, the co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face, joined us to discuss fun, social, and conversational AI. Clem explained why social AI is important, what products they are building (social AIs who learn to chit-chat, talk sassy and trades selfies with you), and how this intersects with the latest research in AI for natural language. He also shared his vision for how AI for natural language with develop over the next few years.

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data. 
• Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 

Featuring:

• Clément Delangue – Website, LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Hugging Face
• Voice Boloss
• Transformer model episodes: 
  • BERT
  • GPT-2
• Hugging Face’s Pytorch pre-trained model repo
• Rasa
• Lyrebird
• Allen Institute for AI
• AllenNLP
• OpenAI
• Fast.ai
• Betaworks Synthetic camp

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

The White House recently published an “Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” In this fully connected episode, we discuss the executive order in general and criticism from the AI community. We also draw some comparisons between this US executive order and other national strategies for leadership in AI.

Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
• Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Relevant learning resources:

• AI for Everyone
• Intel AI list of Ethics toolkits
• Government data 
  • Federal data portal
  • Chicago data portal

References / notes:

• The White House Executive Order
• 4 Experts Respond to Trump’s Executive Order on AI
• Trump’s executive order on AI, explained
• Trump to launch artificial intelligence initiative, but many details lacking (Science)
• National AI strategies overview (Medium article)
• China Is Leading in Artificial Intelligence–and American Businesses Should Take Note
• China plans to be a world leader in Artificial Intelligence by 2030
• Global AI talent Report
• SUMMARY OF THE 2018 DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY: Harnessing AI to Advance Our Security and Prosperity
• Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?
• DOD Takes Strategic Approach to Artificial Intelligence

Books

• “AI Superpowers” by Kai-Fu Lee

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

While covering Applied Machine Learning Days in Switzerland, Chris met El Mahdi El Mhamdi by chance, and was fascinated with his work doing AI safety research at EPFL. El Mahdi agreed to come on the show to share his research into the vulnerabilities in machine learning that bad actors can take advantage of. We cover everything from poisoned data sets and hacked machines to AI-generated propaganda and fake news, so grab your James Bond 007 kit from Q Branch, and join us for this important conversation on the dark side of artificial intelligence.

Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
• Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. 

Featuring:

• El Mahdi El Mhamdi – Website, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• El Mahdi El Mhamdi on LinkedIn
• Google Scholar
• Personal blog
• World Health Organization | Ten threats to global health in 2019
• AggregaThor
• The Hidden Vulnerability of Distributed Learning in Byzantium
• Machine Learning with Adversaries: Byzantine Tolerant Gradient Descent
• Asynchronous Byzantine Machine Learning (the case of SGD)

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!